Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan and President ObamaSome of President Obama’s troubles are because of the people with whom he’s associated, a Turkish columnist has pointed out.

For example, America is under pressure right now from Turkey because officials there want Turkish dissident Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim living in Pennsylvania since 1999, arbitrarily arrested and returned to Turkey.

“We want a terrorist from you. … And you still resist. … What court? What court for a terrorist? Is it too difficult to cancel a Green Card?” asked Turkish dictator Tayyip Recep Erdogan.

Also, Turkey has demanded that Reza Zarrab, in jail since last winter on charges of sanctions evasion and money laundering, be freed.

“According to what rule had that arrest been made?” Erdogan demanded.

The problems, according to Burak Bekdil, a columnist for the Hurriyet Daily and a fellow at the Middle East Forum, are because Obama quickly sidled up to Erdogan when he was elected.

And he probably didn’t even understand what “democracy” meant at the time, Bekdil writes in a report at the Gatestone Institute.

“Can there be democracies and democracies with religious prefixes? Is the United States a democracy or a Christian democracy? Is Israel a democracy or a Jewish democracy? Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?” Bekdil asks.

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Obama, the columnist explains, in 2010 called Turkey a “great Muslim democracy.”

He added, “The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union.

“In reality, the president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a ‘Muslim democracy.’ Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy,” the columnist wrote.

Obama, after his first election, had cultivated “a private relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was then prime minister).”

“In a 2012 Time interview, Obama named Erdogan as one of the five world leaders with whom he had the strongest bonds. In 2011, Tom Donilon, the president’s former national security adviser, said that Obama regarded Erdogan as ‘a man of principle, and also a man of action.’”

What happened, Bekdil wrote, was Obama “persistently lived in this make-believe world until very recently.”

The commentary noted Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic’s April 2016 issue: “Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West. … But Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian.”

Consequently, Erdogan, whose critics accuse him of positioning his country to be the seat of a new worldwide Islamic caliphate, is making demands of the U.S., regarding Gulen, about Zarrab, and more.

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“U.S. officials tell the Turks that it is the independent U.S. courts that will decide [the cases], based on the evidence provided by Ankara. The Turks do not understand that a court can decide something independently of the country’s elected president,” Bekdil wrote.

“Apparently, Erdogan thinks that the U.S. is ruled as Turkey is ruled. He does not understand that the president of the United States cannot phone a judge and order an arrest warrant for a foreign national. He does not understand that in the U.S., the administration cannot decide who is a terrorist and who is not without a court verdict. In Turkey, the government does.”

Further, there are the Kurds fighting ISIS in Syria with the support of the U.S. Erdogan considers them terrorists and wants them eliminated.

The result, columnist Tolga Tanis explained in the Hurriyet, is a surging conflict between the nations.

“There is no doubt that the Turkish-U.S. relations, just before presidential election in the U.S. in November, are passing through a critical junction. There are no traffic lights at the junction. And both sides are running fast without slowing down.”